Making Porridge Slowly

On the quiet virtue of a breakfast that refuses to be hurried.

Porridge is a stubborn breakfast. It will not be hurried. Turn the heat too high in your impatience and it spits, catches, and welds itself to the bottom of the pan in a way that will haunt the washing-up. The only way to make good porridge is to stand over it and stir, slowly, for as long as it takes, and this, I have decided, is precisely why it is worth making.

In a kitchen full of foods that yield in seconds, porridge insists on its own pace. It is a small daily lesson in the futility of rushing, served warm in a bowl.

The stove will not be rushed

There is a particular kind of person, and I have been this person, who treats breakfast as an obstacle between sleep and the day. For them there are bars to be unwrapped, cereals to be drowned, things that require no attention and offer none. Porridge is the opposite. It demands that you stay. It asks for your hand on the spoon and your eye on the pan, and in return it gives you a few minutes that belong to no one else.

The stirring is the heart of it. Round and round, the oats slowly surrendering, the milk thickening, the whole thing turning from a thin grey soup into something glossy and substantial. You cannot speed this up. You can only attend to it. And in the attending, the mind goes quiet, the way it does over any slow repetitive task, the worries of the coming day held at bay by the simple need to keep the spoon moving.

An anchor at the start of the day

I have come to think of the porridge as an anchor. Whatever the day holds, however quickly it is about to demand that I move, it begins with a few minutes that cannot be rushed. The stove sets the tempo, and the tempo is slow. By the time the bowl is filled I have already practised, in miniature, the art of doing one thing at a time without hurry.

You cannot make porridge faster by wanting it faster. There are worse lessons to learn before eight in the morning.

There is also the matter of warmth, the plain animal comfort of something hot on a cold morning. A bowl of porridge held in both hands is a small fortification against the world. It is the breakfast of people who have somewhere to walk to in the rain, and it has fortified them, in this country, for a very long time. There is a quiet companionship in that.

The bowl at the end

And then there is the eating, which deserves the same unhurried treatment as the making. Porridge is not a food to be bolted. It is to be eaten in small warm spoonfuls, perhaps with something on top, a spoon of jam, a scatter of seeds, a swirl of honey, whatever small ceremony you favour. To rush the eating is to undo all the slow good of the making.

None of this takes long. Ten minutes, perhaps, from pan to empty bowl. But they are ten minutes lived at a different speed from the rest of the day, ten minutes in which nothing can be hurried and so nothing is. The day will speed up soon enough. It always does. But it began slowly, over a pan of oats, with a spoon turning steadily and nowhere in particular to be. That, I have found, is no small way to begin.